Of late I’ve noticed something quite alarming. Short blog posts with more tags tacked on at the bottom than actual words within the post.
Tags are fine. Helpful even. But when there are more tags than there is content, I fear we’ve crossed over more than a chasm into an unpleasant valley where we are writing more for the machines — the search engines — than we are for the actual people who might read our deathless, or deadly, prose.
This dilemma echoes a criticism I have long had of business Web sites — that they spend far too much time "optimizing" for search engines, and not nearly enough time just putting forward a simple value proposition for their customers.
My two cents? If you write compelling copy on your Web site that tells your current and prospective customers why they might want to do business with you, you will use the right keywords. If you’ve taken the time to understand, and develop, what your customers really need, the language will follow. If you haven’t, no amount of manipulation, or SEO fees, will work.
Sorry.
The same is true for blogs. This is a conversation. If your principal objective is to be discoverable in search engines… that’s talking to the machines, not to people. A few tags on a post is fine. 20 is stupid. Really. How can your post be about 20 things?
It’s not.
If you are writing for the machines, whether a Web site or a blog, I am pretty sure you will bore me to tears.
Sorry.
And if you are writing for the machines, don’t think we don’t know it.
We do.
Tags: SEO, tagging, search engine optimization, corporate blogging, blogging, B2B, B2C